María Santos Gorrostieta Salazar, former mayor of Tiquicheo, was found dead on November 15th, aged 36

AMONG Mexico’s mayors, María Santos Gorrostieta had good claim to be the prettiest. A pert, faun-like face, large brown eyes, beautifully shaped eyebrows, an hourglass figure. Her web page showed her in work attire: a neat white blouse, tight blue jeans that were fashionably faded, perfect nail-polish, a mobile phone stuck jauntily in her belt. Out and about, she wore a white straw cowboy hat. Beneath the wide brim her smile was enchanting.

The pictures that made her famous, though, were different. In January 2011 she sent them with an open letter to the municipality of Tiquicheo, in wild-west Michoacán, of which she had been mayor since 2008. She also posted them on her web page. They showed her half-naked. Under her right arm was a line of scars. Down the centre of her breastbone as far as the waist was a livid surgical suture. Clamped to her right abdomen was a colostomy bag as lurid as an open wound.

She was showing her body like this, she wrote, injured, mutilated and insulted, because some people still did not believe that a year before she had been shot with assault rifles from a moving car. Her van had been struck by 30 bullets. Three had found her. Only three months before, in October 2009, she and her husband José had been ambushed as they drove through the town of El Limón. She had been hurt then, too, and her husband had been killed, leaving her with three small children and a mayor’s job to do. Well, she was still doing it; still on her feet.

These grandes desgracias kept happening in her life. She did not attribute them to anyone. Outsiders could be pretty sure that she was a target of the drug gangs that have turned rural Michoacán into a battlefield over the past six years, and have taken perhaps 60,000 lives in Mexico as a whole. They could be fairly certain that her death, too, after an abduction on November 12th as she drove her small daughter to school, was at the behest of drug lords after her police protection was withdrawn. In her letter, however, she had made no mention of them.

Most probably there was no need to. Her battered body spoke for itself. But then again, as mayor, she had done nothing particular to provoke the narcos or to deserve assassination. She owed nada a nadie, nothing to no one; her books were open, the accounts were clean. She left law-and-order matters to the police. All she wanted was a better quality of life for the 14,000 people of her home town, a place of cattle-raising in thorny chaparral amid dense tropical forest; to pull the place out of its neglect, in which most people “have to tear their souls apart every day to get a scrap of bread for their children”. It must have been God’s will that she was injured. Life sometimes brought suffering that was hard to understand.

Understanding seemed in short supply on everyone’s side. Very few, she thought, knew what this “wounded soul” was going through. Her mother, her children, her brothers, some of the poor she fought for, had supported her. But not the members of her own party, the once-dominant PRI, who had viewed her troubles with indifference and had tried to get her to resign while she was recuperating in hospital. How could she step down, with three little ones to bring up and a duty to honour “the man of my life” who had taught her what was worth fighting for? She stayed on as mayor, but switched to the left-wing PRD in August 2010—later running for Congress on that ticket, but losing.

Just as there were two Marías in the photographs, so two appeared in the letter. One was a fragile woman struggling. She quoted an anonymous prose-poem, “This is what I am”, to describe herself, the tears running down her tired face, her hands wiping the tears away, the skin of her soul

bearing the scars of falls the bruises of blows the open wounds as homage to the bloodiest of sufferings and the noblest of emotions, love, which is not a bird but flies which is not water but purifies which is not God but redeems and makes eternal…

Yet this “dreamer” and “romantic” was filled with inner power, fiercely proud to be “Tiquichense, michoacana, mexicana y universal”. A doctor by training, she was determined to recover by hard work. She had an awful lot still to do for Tiquicheo, she wrote, and a long road to travel. She had climbed just enough of the hill to glimpse the “glorious panorama” on the other side, but now was no time to pause.

A quiet place

Farmworkers making for the fields found her body, beaten and tortured in a ditch by the roadside, three days after her abduction. Her successor, Mario Reyes Tavera of the PRI, met reporters crowding the town after her death with the statement that Tiquicheo was a safe and tranquil place. Before, he said, it had been like a ghost town at three in the afternoon. Now people were happy and busy. The economy had grown by 200% in a year. There was no trouble there.

His predecessor’s trials, he said, had been “personal”. Proceso magazine mentioned troubles in her second marriage. There had been witnesses to the last attack, but no culprits had been identified, and no certain motive: except, of course, the motive that has caused the deaths since 2006 of at least 30 Mexican mayors.